


listen

by samchandler1986



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Fictober 2019, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-24 20:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20913806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samchandler1986/pseuds/samchandler1986
Summary: Fictober19, prompt 16: Listen. No, really listen.[Two decades after GLOW, Justine still has something she needs to give to Ruth.]





	listen

**Prompt 16: Listen. No, really listen.**

_September 26th, 2008_

The sun through the windshield is warm on her hands as she queues in traffic. Winding her way north from the airport to Pasadena, the usual stop-start frustration that is the lot in life of any Los Angeleno. 

It’s been a long day. Morning meetings in Manhattan, a frustrating call with the London studios, all followed up with a delayed flight. Wisdom and experience might help to keep the lid on her temper these days, but the anger is still there. Banked like fire under her skin.

And on the Boulevard there’s another billboard. Rage flares, turning her knuckles white on the hot steering wheel. She grinds her teeth so hard she feels they might crack.

_The Book of Ruth_

_“If you see one film this fall, make it this one.”_

_“A masterpiece of independent cinema.”_

_“A tragi-comic story of extraordinary friendship, betrayal, and love in the most unexpected places. A must see.”  
_

She’s still seething when she pulls into her driveway. Jonathan sees her arrive and comes to greet her at the door. A _missed-you_ kind of kiss on the doorstep, which is sweet, a decade into marriage. “I’m about to head out,” he explains, when they break apart. “Pick Sammy up from practice.”

“Did the game go well?”

“They lost, but she was awarded MVP, so…I guess?”

He shrugs, and she kisses her husband again. “We definitely picked up the wrong baby from the hospital, right?”

He smiles. “I’d think so, if she wasn’t her mother in miniature…”

She heads through to her office once he’s gone to pick up their daughter. She has an hour; probably enough time for what she has in mind. Sinking into the leather chair at her computer, she opens the bottom drawer of her desk. The original tape rest there, along with a Zippo lighter and a worn leather wallet. But the home-burned CD is what she’s after right now. 

She turns on the computer and places it into the drive, pushing the button to load it into the machine. _Click-whir_, and media player opens. A blurry still of his face appears on screen. 

She puts a finger to the monitor, static crawling down her hand as she touches his digital ghost. _Play_.

He’s squinting down the camera, clearing his throat in a way that was once so familiar her heart squeezes to hear it again. “_Hey, kid_,” says Sam through her speakers. “_I guess I should start with a sorry. I know that you’re probably pissed I didn’t say anything about this heart attack bullshit before. I just didn’t want you to worry, you know? There’s no avoiding what’s coming for us. Any of us. And there’s nothing you could have done, so don’t even think about going down that route._” He sighs. “_I know this is melodramatic, even by my standards. I dunno. I just know what it’s like to want to hear someone’s voice… one more time. So, I thought I’d do that for you. Say the sappy stuff you can’t bear to hear when I’m there right in front of you. So, listen. No, really listen. ‘Cos I mean all this, alright?_”

She is crying now, less than twenty miles and more than twenty years from where he must have recorded this. 

“_You were the best thing that ever happened to me and I am… so fucking proud of you. I’m not going to give you a load of advice, because you’re already smarter than I’ve ever managed to be. Whatever you’re wrestling with… no pun intended… you’ll figure it out. But I want to remind you, now, and whenever else you need to hear it: you don’t give in. However hard things seem, you keep fucking going. And whatever anyone else tells you, you remember that you’re the kind of person I always wanted to be. I wish I could have been around to see more of all the things you’re going to do. But I’m grateful for the parts I did see. And… I love you.” _He smiles, that sad twitch of his face behind his glasses, and she knows he was close to tears himself. “_Okay, that’s probably enough, right?” _he says, blurring out of focus as his fingers reach behind the camera lens, and he winks out to black.

She sits, crying quietly in the silence that follows, allowing herself the raw grief for a minute or two. Then she wipes her eyes, putting the CD back into the plastic case carefully, returning it home to the drawer. With his lighter, his wallet. Thirty dollars and his driver’s licence still folded inside, along with a dog-eared photograph of them together on set that she didn’t know he carried until after he died.

And the other VCR tape. The ink on the label is fading now with age but still legible.

_For Ruth,_ it says. _Love, Sam._

* * *

It isn’t raining, this is LA. It’s a blue-sky afternoon in gratuitous mutiny against the best traditions of pathetic fallacy. And Ruth is standing, head-bowed, in front of his headstone.

Justine recognises her at a distance, from the way she’s standing. No one else would be acting the part of solemn mourner so earnestly twenty fucking years after the man was put into the ground. Especially someone who was no-where to be found in the actual aftermath, ignoring calls and letters and even a doorstep call…

Ruth hears her approach, turning at the sound of her boots on the gravel. Two decades have left her thinner in the face than Justine remembers. She wears her hair in a neat bob rather than a perm, defiantly salt-and-pepper rather than dyed, and there are lines around her eyes now when she smiles. Other than that, she’s Ruth. The same slightly anxious smile and awkward hello.

“I wanted to call you,” she says. “But the lawyers said it… wasn’t a good idea.”

“I don’t give a fuck about lawyers, Ruth,” Justine replies. And she knows she sounds just like him, almost like he’s talking through her. Ruth flinches. “You should have called. You should have talked to me.”

“I know.”

Justine nods. “I saw it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I got sent a screener, actually. Some kid at the network who didn’t know; didn’t put two and two together.” She swallows. “It’s good. I think… I know he would have liked it. Except for that happy ending.”

Ruth smiles at that, a touch wobbly. “I know. I… I think I wanted to give him on screen what I fucked up in real life.”

It probably makes sense from Ruth’s perspective, Justine thinks, gut clenching with anger again. Twenty years hasn’t changed what’s on the inside any more than the out, apparently. Life, she wants to say, is not a movie. The line between fact and fiction may blur in Hollywood, but it’s always worth holding on to what’s real. Sam taught her that, so very long ago. 

“He left you something,” she says. “I tried to get it to you, God, years ago.”

“I’m sorry—”

“I don’t… care. But he wanted you to have it and now seemed like it would be the right time to give it.” Justine hands over the video cassette, wrapped in a brown envelope.

Ruth takes it, nonplussed. “Is it a—?”

“A video tape. Yeah.”

Ruth makes a noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “That’s very… very Sam.” She shakes her head. “Did you…?”

“What?”

“Ever watch it?”

Justine shakes her head. She’s come close, several times. But if it was his final fuck you to a woman who scorned him, she doesn’t want that. No more than she does a heartfelt declaration of love to someone she knows he never spoke to again, after a row on the sidewalk over a failed audition. “I have my own tape. That was enough.”

“Well. Thank you.”

There is a moment of silence, under the blue sky, as they both stare at his headstone.

_Sam Francis Sylvia_

_September 26th 1932 – February 21st 1988 _

_Buy the ticket, take the ride_

“Goodbye, Ruth,” she hears herself say. 

“Bye Justine.”

* * *

_Ruth has to buy an ancient VCR from a thrift store to play the tape, in the end. Pushing it into the machine with her heart in her mouth in case it chews the damn thing up_ _—_

_It doesn’t. And the Sam on screen is scowling, the same way he does in her memory. She takes a deep breath, in synchronicity with the man on the video, after all this time._

_“_Hi Ruth_,” he says, _“I know this is a terrible way to do this…”


End file.
